Shakespeare's
Authorship

There
is considerable historical evidence of the existence of a William
Shakespeare who lived in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The vast
majority of academics identify this Shakespeare as the Shakespeare. Over
the years however, such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain ("Is
Shakespeare Dead?"), Henry James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed
disbelief that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, christened William
Shaksper or Shakspere, actually produced the works attributed to him. This
scepticism is variously grounded: such as the lack of a single book to be
found in his otherwise detailed will, the circumscribed social, education
and travel opportunities available to the young author that could have
served to prepare him, the differences in spellings of his name, the
language of the works itself. Mainstream scholars consider all these
supposed mysteries to be explicable.

Many
attribute this debate to the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the
historical records of this period. Even the painting in the National
Portrait Gallery, London (illustration above) may not depict Shakespeare
after all, and the well-known "Flower Portrait" at
Stratford-upon-Avon was demonstrated (by analysing pigment and discovering
chrome yellow) to be an early 19th-century forgery [1]. Various fringe
scholars have suggested writers such as Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher
Marlowe and even Queen Elizabeth I as alternative authors or co-authors
for some or all of "Shakespeare's" work. Some of these claims
necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct
historical evidence for them, although advocates of alternative authors
point to evidentiary gaps in the orthodox history.

Edward
de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of
Queen Elizabeth, became the most prominent alternative candidate for
authorship of the Shakespeare canon, after having been identified in the
1920s. Oxford partisans note the similarities between the Earl's life, and
events and sentiments depicted in the plays and sonnets. Oxford was also
contemporaneously identified as a poet and writer of some talent, and had
the documented education, travel and life experience that one would
ordinarily associate with works both as broad and detailed as Shakespeare.

A
related question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare
himself wrote every word of his commonly-accepted plays, given that
collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan
theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the
authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to
Shakespeare and others.